


chasing malibu nights

by independentalto



Series: (all that i can hear is) a simple song [15]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: daisy johnson character study, in the context of static quake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22276711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/independentalto/pseuds/independentalto
Summary: In the aftermath of Lincoln's death, everyone grieves differently. Daisy chooses to run away.
Series: (all that i can hear is) a simple song [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1594819
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	chasing malibu nights

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "Malibu Nights" by LANY.

Daisy remembers the first weeks after losing Lincoln as being absolute  _ hell _ . 

Everyone processes grief in different ways; this she understands. Mack stares blankly off into space wherever he goes, sometimes he retreats into the cockpit and sits with May, just staring off into the sky. More often than not, Elena is with him, their hands intertwined but neither of them saying a word. Coulson holes himself up in his office, brushing off excuses of company for paperwork and other directorial duties. FitzSimmons take solace in each other; they occasionally remember Daisy’s presence and attempt to console her, but she brushes off their sympathies and goes to end the life of another punching bag. 

May  _ doesn’t  _ mourn. At least, if she has, she hasn’t shown any sign of it -- Daisy barely sees her except for breakfast and dinner, and even then, she is nothing but stoic. Daisy doesn’t know whether that’s better or worse, honestly. And at the end of the day, it still leaves her with no one to mourn with but herself. There are no teasing texts and awful animal memes, no one practically force-feeds her when she goes on coding for too long, even the walls of her bunk are bare, the pictures of the two of them too much to bear.

It’s fitting, in a way -- Lincoln was supposed to be other half on the team, the one she went to in the middle of her crises and helped her through them. The fact that he was gone essentially meant she was, too. So she hatches her plans to make that a reality -- snags some bone growth pills from the lab, nods her goodbyes to May, packs her bags and disappears without a trace. 

Initially, the idea that she’d made the wrong decision haunts her through her days and nights. It’s really because being on her own -- on her own,  _ alone  _ \-- leaves her so much more time than she’d ever thought possible, and the thoughts she’d managed to keep down during the day surfaced whenever Daisy had a down moment -- and she had a  _ lot  _ of them. The nights flash Lincoln’s death behind closed eyelids whenever she tries to catch some sleep. The days taunt her with faces similar to his wherever she looks. 

It’s desperate, it’s frustrating, the night terrors, in particular, keep her in a constant cold sweat, and sometimes, Daisy wonders if she’ll make it to the morning with her broken heart. It isn’t long before she discovers that whiskey running through her blood will help her fall asleep at night, numbing her body and easing the jagged edges of the hole in her heart where Lincoln used to be. Besides, it wasn’t like anyone was there to judge her for it.  _ Especially  _ not Lincoln, whose past made her way of coping the ultimate show of irony. 

When the whiskey runs out, Daisy drives. There’s a specific car on South Sepulveda that never seems to see any road, so at night, she simply hops in, pulls a couple of wires under the dashboard and speeds off into the night unnoticed. Every night, she drives north, chasing the highway signs for Malibu and watching them rush past her in a silent gust of wind. And every night, she stops by a small diner by the side of the highway, orders a shitty cup of coffee and sits near the window facing the ocean, contemplating how naive she’d been to have believed in love in the first place. 

In theory, the drive is supposed to make her forget everything about herself, that she’s just a woman on the highway heading to Malibu. But Lincoln’s words about being a lost soul and fulfilling a purpose don’t leave her head, cycling through every night she drives up and down the highway.  _ If all Inhumans had a purpose,  _ she wondered,  _ what was hers _ ? Surely it wasn’t rescuing cars and using them for their intended purposes in the middle of the night. Still, Daisy wants to find it -- if not to at  _ least  _ pay homage to some of his last words. 

The inspiration, funnily enough, comes during one of her nightly visits to the coffee house. Daisy watches in horror as a group of men called the Watchdogs (bark, bark, she imitates mentally when they introduce themselves) seizes the cafe owner and drags him out the back door, presumably for the fact that his palms glow a gentle orange and that despite the fact that it is a cafe, there are no heating apparatuses anywhere.

She follows them out back and takes the first two out easily, untrained goons had been the first level of May’s rigorous training. The thought makes her smile a little in the middle of the fight -- May would be proud of her, she hopes -- and comes off as all the more unnerving to this particular band of Watchdogs, for all Daisy has to do is quake one against the wall before they scatter like a bunch of lost pups. (She later learns that not all of them are that easy.) 

The cafe owner is helped back inside and patched up to the best of his ability (Daisy may or may not have had to sacrifice her favorite flannel for it), and he sees her off with a jumbo thermos of coffee and ten minutes’ worth of profuse thankings as well as free coffee anytime she happens upon the shop. She, of course, thanks him, wondering if her speedy drive back to her hideout will be the last time she ever visits the cafe. 

Her fire barely abates in the morning, and for the first time, instead of spending it staring at the ceiling lost in thought, Daisy cracks her knuckles and gets to work. She finds out everything there is to know about the Watchdogs, using both SHIELD technique and some...unsanctioned strategies left over from the Rising Tide. The day is lost to lines of code and nothing but the sound of keyboard clacking, and by the time her stomach reminds her loudly enough to eat, it’s already well past midnight. 

Maybe, she thinks as she logs off for the day, this is what she’s meant to do. The Watchdogs seem to be a dangerous organization meant to target Inhumans; maybe it’s her duty to keep them from causing as much harm as she can. Meant to make the world a safer place, much as Lincoln had. 

It won’t necessarily stop the terrors, nor is it the magical solution to her grieving, but, as she lands among the first cell of Watchdogs with fury etched over her face, Daisy thinks it’s a pretty good way to live.

She wonders if she’s making Lincoln proud. 


End file.
